UC Aides Threaten to Strike Over Stalled Talks

The union that represents 9,300 teaching assistants, readers and tutors at UCLA, UC Irvine and six other UC campuses threatened Monday to go on strike beginning Friday, saying management is stalling in contract talks.

The systemwide strike of graduate student employees on the University of California’s campuses would be timed to hit when the university needs their labor the most: just before final exams.

“People are really outraged and ready to strike in big numbers,” said Connie Razza, an organizer at the UCLA union chapter affiliated with the United Auto Workers.

A management spokesman dismissed the threatened strike as a gimmick for public relations. If carried out, he said, it will do more to harm undergraduate education than help resolve contract talks.

How much disruption a strike would cause is hard to forecast.

The teaching assistants staged their first systemwide strike just before final exams in December 1998. During the first four days, that strike disrupted some departments but hardly seemed to faze others.

This time around, union activists point out that union members voted overwhelmingly in favor of a strike. But nearly as many teaching assistants, or TAs, never bothered to vote.

The last strike ended with leaders of the Legislature brokering a 45-day cooling-off period. During the cooling-off period, UC officials agreed to recognize the fledgling union. That led to contract talks with the union’s eight bargaining units, which began last summer and have continued inconclusively ever since.

To avert a strike, union officials said, the university must provide requested information on health benefits. It must quit using tactics that delay negotiations, they say. It also needs to refrain from changing working conditions for graduate student employees without first checking with the union.

The union raised these complaints and others last week by filing more than 40 unfair labor practice charges with the California Public Employment Relations Board.

The board has yet to take up the allegations.

But UC administrators disputed the charges.

“From what we’ve seen so far, the United Auto Workers’ claims are absolutely inaccurate,” said Brad Hayward, a spokesman at UC headquarters in Oakland. “These claims appear to be developed for the purpose of attempting to justify a strike.”

The administration, he said, has been bargaining in good fath.

The TAs do the bulk of hands-on, small-group teaching to freshmen and sophomores on UC campuses, often leading discussion or laboratory sections that supplement large lecture courses. TAs earn about $13,600 a year for working half time during the nine-month academic calendar. They also get health benefits and a waiver for 60% of their student fees.

Christian Sweeney, president of the bargaining unit at UC Berkeley, said union negotiators have grown weary of delaying tactics, including sending in management representatives who claim they have no authority to make preliminary agreements at the bargaining table.

“We’ve seen the unfair labor practices worsening,” said Sweeney, a graduate student in history. “That’s the reason for calling the strike. It just happens to come at a time that the university needs our labor.”

All UC undergraduate campuses, with the exception of UC Berkeley, are preparing to hold final exams either late this week or next week. It’s this time of the academic year when professors rely heavily on graduate students to grade exams and read a mountain of term papers.